I spent a couple of evenings this week watching the annual American Kennel Club dog show in New York, Westminster, on television.

Since I’m currently working a lot on training-dogs.com, I do have dog training on the brain constantly. And so my main response to the show was an admiration for all the well-trained dogs there. They are all socialized to the point where they can be around countless other dogs and people. They are all groomed to within an inch of their lives, of course, and there is a lot of training in that.

Then there’s the matter of presentation. How do they relate to the handler and how does the handler relate to them? In many cases, especially with the more professional handlers, this was very smooth and took its natural place in showing off the way the dog looked when running or whatever.

Do the dogs enjoy it? I am sure that most of the successful ones love the attention and the playful and learning aspects of it all. More than once, when a dog won its group, it was bouncing around happily. James, the English Springer Spaniel who was Best in Show, obviously enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed his win for the irrelevant reason that when I was a kid, my best friend Jeanette had a Springer Spaniel (English or not, I don’t remember) and I loved going to training events with them.

I’ve never taken part in dog shows and don’t expect to start now. When my husband Kelly and I bred llamas, I learned to my surprise that I wasn’t very good at seeing subtleties of conformation… Kelly was way better. So the whole idea that a judge can compare a dog to a mental picture of what the breed should look like is as much beyond my skills as is playing the piano. (Chopsticks, anyone?)

But the training that every one of the 2500 dogs there must have received is noteworthy. I have no idea how many of the contestants were taught using positive dog training methods, but whatever the percentage, I do expect it to increase over time. Positive methods work, but so do traditional ones. Positive methods yield dogs who have more joy about them, and that gives them just a little more at dog shows, where a little can matter a lot.

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